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This is my last post on this blog. Shed no tears; the “Word Power” blog lives on! It has moved to a new website to support the launch, later this year, of my book: Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (and Everything You Can Build From Them).

From now on, you can find the “Word Power” blog—and more (for example, a complete glossary of the writing-related terms defined in the book)—here:

I can’t take you with me, so, if you’re interested, you must re-up. Please do!

The new “Word Power” blog includes news on the book’s progress. I aim to have books ready to preorder this December and ready to order (through Powell’s, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.) in January 2013.

To all who have been following this blog, thank you, thank you, thank you. If you have commented, you have taught me things that I’m happy to know, and you have encouraged me. If you haven’t commented, your shared enthusiasm for words has brightened my days.

Here’s a teaser from my latest blog post, which you can finish reading on the new site. I hope to see you there.

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What is a part of speech? You might not believe how much disagreement and nuanced analysis surrounds that question.

This essay ventures into some philosophical questions—What does it mean to classify a word, and how and why have those classifications changed?—before emerging with a bit of writerly advice. I find this excursion invigorating, like a deep‑sea search for treasure. Come along, and we’ll share the spoils.

According to one modern school of linguistic thought, only four word types—nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs—now qualify as parts of speech. Four. The nerve! … Read on –>

A few posts ago (see What Brand R U?), I invited all XML-inclined readers to take a break from their hard slogging and have a little fun by concocting recipes for a drink I call the XMLonball Splash. My one taker—Scott Abel, THE Content Wrangler—submitted such a witty, creative recipe that no one else dared to even attempt to compete. Made the judging easy.

I’ve tried a variation on this delicious recipe (with who-knows-what substituted for the cactus juice liqueur), and I have to warn you: don’t drink this and drive.

Below are two versions of the recipe, one with and one without XML tags. According to Scott, any code abuse you might notice—that is, any shenanigans within the brackets—is intentional.

Thanks for playing along, Scott. You make the wranglin’ world go ’round.

Like this:

For all you professional writers who struggle with managing mountains of information at work—whether you write technical manuals, marketing literature, training materials, service guides, online help, or what have you—the new edition of Ann Rockley’s classic book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, coauthored with Charles Cooper, calls to you.

The illustrations alone make this second edition worth picking up (especially if your boss springs for it). For example, one glance at the beer-can-chicken recipe as it appears in a printed book, on an eReader display, on a nice big monitor, and on a smartphone—and suddenly the abstract discussions of “information modeling” make sense.

The case studies sprinkled throughout this edition also bring the realities of content management to life, most tellingly the last study: the “lesson in failure” due to “lack of ongoing oversight.” Short-term budgeters, beware! (In this case, three years is a short term.)

Rockley and Cooper, along with the many folks who contributed to this book, did an impressively thorough job covering all aspects of content management. Some sentences leave me wishing that the book had gone through another round of editing. (“Structured writing is the way elements in a component are written.” Huh?) But the book’s overall value compensates for its occasional lack of clarity. This book represents a bright light of encouragement and insight for anyone with the courage to follow its authors into content management’s daunting new world.

Do you need the hyphen here? Most authorities, rightly, say no. Don’t hyphenate a compound modifier when it follows a noun. Before a noun, yes (Thisis a long-term job),but after, no (Thisjob is long term).

Most authorities also point out exceptions. They say, again rightly, that some compounds (blue-green, razor-sharp, risk-averse,time-sensitive, etc.) need a hyphen every time. When in doubt, they say, consult a dictionary or style guide.

Fine advice as far as it goes.

But most authorities don’t tell you what you most need to know. They don’t tell you that if you ask “Do I need a hyphen here?” after a noun, you’re almost always asking the wrong question. Read more…

Is where. What an unuseful, unsatisfying phrase. I’m talking about definitions like these:

A gravy train is where someone makes lots of money without doing much for it.

A retweet is where you forward a tweet.

Horticulture is where people grow plants.

If you wanted to understand gravy trains, retweets, and horticulture, these half-clarifications would leave you wondering what types of things these things are. Surely a gravy train has nothing to do with gravy or trains, does it? What exactly is a retweet before it gets forwarded? If horticulture is where people grow plants, does that make it a plot of ground? You might reread the definitions, suspecting that you missed something. You might feel vaguely cheated, left behind with the most basic of questions unanswered.

Like this:

Keith Kmett, a user-experience enthusiast whom I met through the social-media magic of Google+, responded to my last post (What Brand RU) with this comment: “I would add that social media can also help your personal brand.” Keith’s note prompted me to add a new section to that post. Below is the new section in standalone form—with all-new images.

A hashtag—a # symbol plus a text string, like #ThisIsAHashtag—is a powerful symbol for getting your words seen. Even if you’ve never sent a tweet (a brief message on Twitter) in your life and think you never will, you ought to know what hashtags can do. If you tweet without hashtags, you limit your visibility. Add a hashtag to any tweet, and you instantly reach many more people.